Rebus of the week
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[There's supposed to be an embedded skeet below, which is sometimes not coming through — so here's a screenshot:
]
Thought about responding to the and realized that I'd rather stick my tongue in a light socket so go me, I can learn.
— Elizabeth Bear (@matociquala.bsky.social) January 9, 2025 at 4:08 PM
In case you missed it,
that image sequence is "disk horse" = "discourse", implemented as the Unicode sequence
0x1F4BF "OPTICAL DISC" 0x1F40E "HORSE"
At least I think that "discourse" is the intended interpretation :-)…
Update — It's worth noting that the pictured "OPTICAL DISK" is going the way of the buggy whip…
I'll also note that WordPress seems to delete those Unicode characters in posts, at least in this case, which is why I've used a fragment of a screenshot to represent them.
Don said,
January 10, 2025 @ 2:29 pm
My mind first went to "disc jockey," which would be much less clever and also make less sense because that horse has no rider.
Sarah A said,
January 10, 2025 @ 3:14 pm
You are correct Mark! I was first made aware of disk horse/ in a gaming Discord in 2020.
Looking into it, the phrase has been in usage since at least 2017 – it looks like this mildly viral Tumblr post may have helped to popularize it:
https://www.tumblr.com/rokuromacbeth/163334129285/so-i-have-a-question-for-a-certain-user
David Morris said,
January 10, 2025 @ 3:49 pm
To my eyes, first thing in the morning, the first element looked like a lifebuoy, so 'boy horse'. After looking closer, I figured it out, but I'm clueless as to which particular discourse she's talking about.
Yves Rehbein said,
January 10, 2025 @ 4:50 pm
I am more intrigued by the light socket metaphore. Modern instalations should have circuit breakers in place so it won't do much but blind your sight and burst your ear drums. You might rather bite your tongue, as it were.
bks said,
January 10, 2025 @ 5:31 pm
"so go me" was more of a stumbling block.
AntC said,
January 10, 2025 @ 7:48 pm
"disk horse" = "discourse"
That would have to be "disk 'orse". So it doesn't work for me with an 'h'. (I do drop my 'h's in some word-initials, when talking very quickly/sloppily, but not in "horse".) Also do the young people know/remember what a CD was?
Further, rendered that small, the thing isn't recognisable as a CD: a frisbee? a bowling-ball? 'Responding to the [troll's] Hobby-horse' seems more the thing you'd think better of on social media.
Jason said,
January 10, 2025 @ 9:20 pm
The best I could come up before reading below the fold was "Power Button Whores", theorized as a kind of "Super Troll" that pushes your "Power Button".
Michael Vnuk said,
January 10, 2025 @ 10:20 pm
Many emojis might as well be Chinese characters to me, as they are often stylised, and then the link with the real object becomes harder to determine. Making them so tiny also doesn't help. How does anyone differentiate between the 100-plus emoji faces that my phone offers? And even if I could see differences, how would I remember what they mean? The multiple variants of a face with the tongue sticking out are beyond me. And then there is the extra stuff. The horse in the original seemed to have lots of other unidentifiable material around it. Only when I zoomed right in did I see that the extra stuff was its large mane and a weirdly positioned tail, plus an intrusively thick black outline around the whole thing. If you want a horse, draw a simple horse. Finally, and puzzlingly, Mark's blow-up of the two images shows very different images. The CD (as someone mentioned, possibly alien to younger emoji users) is lit differently and has a white hole in its centre rather than black, while the horse looks far more realistic than the emoji (but where does the green saddle come from?). Nonetheless, the rebus is clever.
Seth Bailley said,
January 11, 2025 @ 3:07 am
I thought it was some sort of button or dial followed by a mare.
Dial + a mare = Thought about responding to the dilemma and realized I'd rather stick my tongue in a light socket ….
Philip Taylor said,
January 11, 2025 @ 7:09 am
For me, it was clearly a dis{c|k} jockey (until I learned otherwise). The jockey was how I interpreted the semi-upright thing sitting on the horse's bum. OK, no jockey would ever (intentionally) adopt that position, but I am a simple-minded fellow and that was my simple-minded interpretation.
Robert Coren said,
January 11, 2025 @ 10:28 am
At the size displayed, the "disk" looked like a fan to me, so I couldn't make any sense of it. Seeing it enlarged makes it clear, and "disk horse" -> "discourse" is not a difficult leap for me, despite the fact that I don't drop my h's.
@bks: Are you really not familiar with "go me"? "Go you" for "good for you" (meaning "congratulations, well done") is pretty common in informal discourse these days, and an extension to congratulating oneself (perhaps with a touch of irony) seems pretty natural.
@Philip: I think that "semi-upright thing sitting on the horse's bum" is its tail.
bks said,
January 11, 2025 @ 10:36 am
Robert, I got both of the puzzles but I don't think I've ever heard or read "go me." I got it by extension from "you go, girl" after a moment.
Mark Liberman said,
January 11, 2025 @ 11:05 am
@AntC: "That would have to be "disk 'orse". So it doesn't work for me with an 'h'."
In my variety of American English, the final /k/ of "disk" is unreleased, and the initial /h/ fills in for the aspiration that would be there if the /k/ were post-stress word-medial.
There's a difference, but across contexts and rates of speech I'll bet the acoustic distributions would overlap, and even in citation forms (as below) "disk horse" could pass for "discourse".
(The first one is "disk horse", the second one is "discourse"…)
You should record and post your own versions, so we can see if your intuition about how you normally talk is as (in-)accurate as sociolinguists would predict…
Mark Liberman said,
January 11, 2025 @ 11:08 am
@David Morris: "I'm clueless as to which particular discourse she's talking about.":
It was discussion on social media of her book Hammered, described by David Barnett this way:
I'm reading a 20-yr old book*, and got chills when I got to the part in which a UN peacekeeping force led by Canadian troops had to secure the US border and quell the violent uprisings in NY against the christofascist gov't amidst the climate change chaos.
*Hammered by @matociquala.bsky.social
Philip Taylor said,
January 11, 2025 @ 11:17 am
« There's a difference, but across contexts and rates of speech I'll bet the acoustic distributions would overlap, and even in citation forms (as below) "disk horse" could pass for "discourse" » — I respectfully disagree. I would concede that "discourse" could pass for "disk horse", but not vice versa.
Mark Liberman said,
January 11, 2025 @ 11:37 am
@Philip Taylor: "I would concede that "discourse" could pass for "disk horse", but not vice versa.":
I'd bet a large sum of money that you're wrong, not to say full of it. Remember that we're not talking about my citation-form pronunciations, but about renditions in fluent context.
Philip Taylor said,
January 11, 2025 @ 2:30 pm
I was speaking ("writing") only of your citation-form pronunciations, as embedded above. In the absence of a reasonable assortment of "renditions in fluent context", I reserve my judgement there. What did you mean by "not to say full of it" ?
Chris Button said,
January 11, 2025 @ 4:23 pm
@ Mark Liberman
Wouldn't the /s/ before the /k/ have something to say about that though?
martin schwartz said,
January 11, 2025 @ 8:31 pm
Since there seems to be an exclamation mark on the left, the re-bus is driving leftward, and since CD = compact disc, it would be read "horse disc". For some reason, an Ancient Egyptian calf with a solar disk just to the north of its horns is a quasi?-rebus? or at least logo for Novo Nordisk™ Very globalist.
Martin Schwartz
Michael Vnuk said,
January 11, 2025 @ 8:52 pm
That's not an exclamation mark on the left of Mark's blow-up. It's just the rightmost edge of a lowercase 'e', probably brought in when Mark took a screenshot of part of the original, where the word before the rebus is 'the' (although no one has explained yet why the emojis have been rendered very differently).
Mark Liberman said,
January 11, 2025 @ 9:22 pm
@Chris Button: "Wouldn't the /s/ before the /k/ have something to say about that though?"
Not really, because of the syllable break between the /s/ and the /k/ of "discours". The fact that the first syllable has the main stress weakens the aspiration — as in "blinker" or "pin curl" or "bat cave" — but not as much as would happen in "high school" or other words where the /sk/ is a syllable-initial cluster. At least that's the prediction…
Jonathan Lundell said,
January 11, 2025 @ 9:26 pm
There are several buggy-whip emoji, and I’m curious about their recognizability to the youts (I’m looking at Apple versions). The desk phone and telephone receiver, for examples, and the why-is-it-even-there film frames for another. (I’m also reminded of the “call me” gesture: closed fist with thumb and pinkie extended.)
Yves Rehbein said,
January 12, 2025 @ 4:00 am
@ Michael Vnuk, the different images come from different .svg for different sizes, so if you zoom in your browser and scale text size it can replace the emoji vector graphics with more detailed ones.
Yves Rehbein said,
January 12, 2025 @ 4:05 am
Whereas if you take a screenshot and zoom in on the rasterized image it becomes mosaic or blurry, which seems to have happened here, too.
Andrew Usher said,
January 12, 2025 @ 10:13 am
Mark Liberman said:
> … [there is aspiration] because of the syllable break between the /s/ and the /k/ of "discourse". The fact that the first syllable has the main stress weakens the aspiration …
Yet, pronounced with second-syllable stress (as always for the verb) there is no aspiration at all, so the /s/ does have its predicted effect. There seems to be two different things here, making the aspiration just enough to be confusable with 'disk horse'.
> … not as much as would happen in "high school" or other words where the /sk/ is a syllable-initial cluster.
This is of course correct, but "high school" may not be a good example; though I and presumably you pronounce it as high + school, many Americans lexicalise it as one word and say 'hice cool' – raising of the first vowel proves this – and thus have as much a syllable break as in 'discourse'.
Note: I've mentioned before using Youglish to check one's intuitions. I listened to over 100 examples of 'high school', expecting to perhaps find an age effect; I could not. But there was a massive gender effect, with most males saying 'high school' and most females 'hice cool' across all age groups! (Only NS Americans ever say 'hice cool', so others can be excluded.) I was not listening for aspiration.
Robert Coren said,
January 12, 2025 @ 10:34 am
@bks: I have a friend who uses "go me" frequently on social media, usually with a tinge of irony (sometimes made explicit with an added question mark).
KevinM said,
January 13, 2025 @ 12:47 pm
"Go me" seems to be equivalent to the more intelligible "yay me." E.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Tipton#:~:text=While%20the%20character%20is%20a,chain%20and%20the%20SS%20Tipton. More intelligible because yay means "hooray for," whereas go has many senses other than its "go team" sense.